I have recently been asked a number of questions that are common when potential users come to setting up the WebPA tool for use at their institution. Below are the questions and answers.
1. Software
Q Having installed the original software, do you provide patches & new releases? If so, how often are patches & upgrades released?
A We provide patches as and when they are identified/provided and fixes - this tends to be immediately after an installation and then when any are found after that. We are trying to provide patch notification thought the JISCmail list[1] and the project website[2]
Upgrades are made when major improvements are made or there have been sufficient patches to warrant a new release. Through the life of the JISC funding we have tried to make a release every six months. However, out of the funding the releases may be more spread out. I have tried to make sure that we have only changed the code and kept things like database changes to the minimum.
Q Looking at the item on the WebPA website relating to the another institutions implementation of WebPA, they mention using Apache web server & MySQL for the database. Checking with the technical guys here, they would use IIS web server & SQL Server for the database. Would that cause any issues?
A Here at Loughborough we run a flavour of Linux with PHP and MySQL, at Hull they are running Windows with PHP and MySQL. There are some tweaks that need to be made for the email functionality to work, but I think they are covered in the installation guide (currently being up dated). As for SQL Sever, we have never run it on this. There will be some changes needed to work for the SQL queries but we can discuss doing this. Our problem would be that we do not have access to SQL Server to do the development of this, but we are happy to work closely with anyone to get this done, if that is your requirement.
2. Hardware
Q What would you suggest as a baseline hardware configuration?
A I will need to get back to you on the requirements for a baseline, I should be able to get this from the Guys at Hull. Here at Loughborough the system runs on a server which is managed for us.
Q If a large number of users start to use WebPA here, we would look at having failover capabilities in place just in case something serious happened to the hardware. Do you know of any other WebPA users who use failover or are users sticking to just one server & accepting that the WebPA system will be down should that server fail?
A We have a fall over, which is to a back up server which has taken an image over night. For us this is quite important as we have over 6,000 students taking an assessment in one year. Having talked to academic tutors about contingencies when there is a fall over/ failure they are happy to revert back to group marks and explain the situation to the students. Although this may not be ideal in many cases academic tutors are told to have back up plans for such events.
3. Loading data on staff & students
Q How do you recommend this is approached? We could extract data from our SunGard Banner system but what format would you expect it to be in for loading into WebPA?
A For the pilot of WebPA we have a system where you can batch load with a csv file through the admin interface. We specify the layout of the data, but we only take the minimal information about users. In the longer term we have left the choice of long term integration to each institution. Following the user group we will be looking at the possibilities of APIs again. Here at Loughborough we hold the user details in a separate database as the information is maintained and held for a number of different applications.
The information required is;
for staff and students
institutional_reference, forename, lastname, email, username,module_code, department_id, course_id, password
and for the module information
module_code, module_title
You may also be interested to know that one of the other institutions using WebPA are looking at developing a power link for Black board/webct vista for the transfer of student information.
If you have any information which can be used to suppliment what we already have feel free to pass it on.
Happy New Year
Nic
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Nicola Wilkinson
eLearning Systems Developer
WebPA Project, engCETL
email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://webpaproject.lboro.ac.uk/
JISCmail: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/webpa.html
Project Blog: http://webpa-tec.blogspot.com/
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